The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Essay Example

I enjoyed reading “the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” during my English class. The novel is about a young boy, Huck, searching of freedom and adventure. Through all the journeys in river, he meets Jim, and they become good at friends. From Jim, Huck learns a lot of lessons to improve himself as a decent person. Their friendship is so precious in the novel. Some say that there was deep racism with discrimination between black people and white people in the novel. Furthermore, some claim that the novel shows their discrimination to black slaves without sensing the slave’s humanity. However, the liberty, humanity, and respectability of black people are identified by the relationship between Huck and Jim.
In “Selling Huck Finn down the river: A response to Jane Smiley”, Seymour Chwast demonstrates that Jim is a typical black character as “ignorant, superstitious, and passive” and exposes the racism in the novel. At the beginning of the novel, Jim’s superstitions sometimes lead to the essences of silliness . From this perspective, Jim seems stupid and ignorant, because he believes in some foolish superstitions that do not make sense at all. For example, Jim say that Huck killing a spider that would bring bad luck , and the hair-ball used to tell fates . Jim‘s superstitions slightly portray him as an inactive and stubborn slave. Jim is also considered as an object which can be sold and bought by the white people in the novel. According to this view, racism is clearly exposed through Jim. In “ Say it ain’t so,Huck:Second thoughts on Mark Twain ‘s masterpiece”, Jane Smiley states that the word “nigger” is used over and over by Huck to call Jim. To this point, I think he means the white man such as Huck, or even Twain doesn’t feel sorry or have any excuse for prejudice against black people. Huck is a white person, and he was raised in white society, so he believes that black people were lower than white people. For instance,